A woman in Wyoming and a farm worker in Ohio marked the latest Americans hospitalized with bird flu, as the virus continues to disrupt the poultry and cattle industries.
Bird flu has infected nearly 70 people and caused one death in the United States since last April. Since January, three people have been hospitalized for bird flu, including an older person who died in Louisiana. Before then, a person in Missouri hospitalized in September for an unrelated health issue turned out to also have bird flu. In Canada, a teenage girl became critically ill in November with severe respiratory issues from bird flu, also called highly pathogenic avian influenza.
Since the summer, the U.S. has begun preparing about 10 million doses of a vaccine that they think will be effective against H5N1 bird flu. Federal officials have elected not to use the vaccine yet, given that illnesses had been relatively mild, mostly with eye redness and flu-like symptoms that didn’t require hospitalization, and there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission. Health officials have said bird flu’s risk to the general public is low.
But as more people are hospitalized with bird flu, health experts say preemptive vaccination could prevent further transmission from animals to humans.
Multiple requests to federal agencies − including the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, tasked with stockpiling vaccines, and the Department of Health and Human Services − were not returned.
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The national stockpile should be sufficient to focus immunization efforts on first responders and at-risk populations, said Dr. Hana El Sahly, a professor of Molecular Virology and Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
These vaccines should also protect against the newest variant of the bird flu, the D1.1 strain, which was detected in a dairy cattle worker in Nevada last week. Previously, cows had carried the B3.13 genotype since bird flu spilled over to dairy cows in Texas in early 2024.
The stockpiled vaccines are licensed and ready to be mobilized, said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Health officials could start vaccinating farmworkers at risk of contracting bird flu from poultry or cows.
“What you want to do is limit the spread of virus from animals to people,” he said. This would limit opportunities for the virus to mutate and become more transmissible among humans.
Health officials in Finland have already used some of their stockpiled vaccines for high-risk people. They began distributing 20,000 doses to people ages 18 and older exposed to animals they believed were susceptible to bird flu, including workers in the country’s mink industry.
But vaccine uptake has been low there due to vaccine hesitancy and workers not perceiving bird flu as a “high threat,” said Dr. Richard Webby, a virologist at St. Jude’s Research Hospital, in Memphis, Tennessee.
Both the Finnish and the U.S. bird flu vaccines are made by CSL Seqirus but are different vaccines. In the summer, U.S. officials stockpiled 4.8 million doses of the vaccine that officials said was effective against circulating H5N1 strains. In October, the U.S. issued a $72 million grant to three manufacturers to double the nation’s stockpile.
Collectively, officials said about 10 million doses would be ready by the spring. In email responses, CSL referred to its funding announcement in October.
Offit worries vaccine hesitancy may also play a role in U.S. preparedness against bird flu. On Friday, the Trump administration issued an executive order that prohibited federal funding for COVID-19 mandates in schools.
State lawmakers and health officials have begun to follow suit. The Louisiana health department said last week it would stop promoting mass vaccination in general, only a month after the country’s first bird flu death was recorded in the state.
The Trump administration has also slashed the federal workforce in key health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, which Offit says all play a role in disease surveillance and pandemic preparedness.
“It’s the worst possible time because you have this attack on public health agencies,” he said. “They’re essentially dysfunctional, right now, at a time when you need them to function.”
In the meantime, U.S. officials launched an effort to vaccinate livestock workers with the seasonal flu shot. The vaccine doesn’t offer protection against H5N1. But health experts say it could prevent someone from simultaneously having both seasonal flu, which is highly contagious, and H5N1, which can be extremely dangerous.
Existing antiviral medications, such as Tamiflu, have also been effective at treating people infected with bird flu.
As of mid-November, the CDC has provided more than 100,000 doses of seasonal influenza vaccine to 12 states affected by bird flu outbreaks in animals, including California, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, New Mexico, Ohio, South Dakota and Texas.
Pharmaceutical company Moderna is also developing a bird flu vaccine for humans and has received about $766 million from the U.S. government for its advancement.
The company said last month it was preparing to advance its experimental shot, mRNA-1018, into late-stage trials based on preliminary data from an early- to mid-stage study.
Contributing: Reuters.
Adrianna Rodriguez can be reached at [email protected].